I have to admit it. I really don’t “get” Cezanne.* I’m not sure why, but it’s true. Several years ago (I think it was probably about 2012) I saw the large exhibition of his portraits at the National Portrait Gallery, in London, and I remember remarking on my own perplexity and dissatisfaction on that occasion. This week a friend loaned me the film that was made of that exhibition, and this evening I watched it …. with the same result.
Perhaps one reason for my perplexity, certainly in relation to his portraits, has to do with his lack of real interest in the psychology of his sitters. He seems to treat them as if they are simply a different kind of still-life, along with his baskets of apples, or another variety of landscape, such as his frequent studies of Mont Sainte-Victoire. They are simply complex objects to be explored rather objectively. The problem for Cezanne seems to lie in how to represent them rather than what it is that he is representing.
I have a suspicion that a part of my inability to get onto his wavelength has to do with the primacy of his interest in colour, and my own tentative relation to it. Whatever the problem is here, I think that I ought to put in some effort to understand it, and not simply push it aside as one of life’s incomprehensibles.
One thing did strike me in passing, however, as I watched the film, and that is the similarity of one aspect of Cezanne’s concerns to a primary interest of David Hockney. He too is a man who has a lively sense of colour, and also somebody with the same interest in the representation of space without resorting to the conventional devices of aerial perspective. I couldn’t help noting en passant the fact that both Cezanne and Hockney have pictures entitled The Big Trees. I wonder if that is a conscious homage on the part of Hockney.
*My apologies to French visitors, but this word-processing facility doesn’t allow me to insert accents.